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Editorial: Traction elusive in U.S. economy

Posted:
05/10/2016 07:40:40 PM MDT

A recruiter speaks to an attendee at a job fair in Pittsburgh in March. The federal government announced lackluster jobs numbers for April. (Keith Srakocic / AP)

April's figures on the economy provide reality in the face of political candidates claiming it is bad or good, while offering their approaches to the well-being of the sometimes seemingly impervious beast.

The job figures for April announced last week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Standards could be considered to be bad, or indifferent at best. The economy created 160,000 jobs under April's showers, with hopes for May flowers. That was the lowest for seven months. The unemployment rate stayed at 5 percent, leaving 7.9 million job-seeking Americans out in the cold.

That disappointing figure came on top of the even more depressing announcement that U.S. gross domestic product growth for the first quarter of 2016 had weighed in at a meager 0.5 percent annualized rate. That was down from an already low 1.4 percent for the last three months of 2015. Maybe even worse was that labor force participation in the economy was 62.8 percent, down from March.

On the positive side, average hourly earnings on an annualized basis were up 2.5 percent, although comments and questions at political rallies would indicate that Americans either haven't noticed, consider the rise to be badly distributed between the rich and the middle class, or far too small to make a difference to their standard of living.

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Looking at the U.S. by comparison in its international trade with the rest of the world, the picture is not pretty. The U.S. trade deficit fell to $40.4 billion in March, a drop from February, and the lowest gap since November 2014, crowed the Commerce Department. But it was still a major deficit, not a surplus, and the U.S. national debt, which amounts now to $19.3 trillion, continues to include trillions of dollars in debt to China, Japan and other countries, built up by years of such trade deficits.

U.S. imports dropped by 13.9 percent from February, but exports dropped also, by 0.9 percent.

There is no question but that the performance of the economy — mainly in the area of economic inequality and middle-class earnings — is going to be a major issue in this year's elections. So will be the trade balance. Voters will be watching amid the cacophony of the political caterwauling what candidates say exactly they are going to do to remedy these problems.

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